Tag Archives: Literary Criticism

What gives Mrs Dalloway its distinction, however, is not the plot but the speculative and lyrical sensibility with which the heroine Clarissa is endowed. Though a ‘tinselly’ party-giver, she is yet shown to sympathize and even identify with a shell-shocked war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, whom she has never met.

Through its exploration of colonial and postcolonial education policies, The Amateur reminds us, colonial education does not only alienate the subject from her culture but also uses education as a tool to impart and spread imperialism. The notorious Bantu Education Act (1953), which restricted resources for coloured students, was a stark institutionalization of ‘education apartheid’

This approach is further developed in Sachin Ketkar’s piece (‘World Literature and Literary Historiography of Pre-colonial South Asian Vernaculars: Towards a Methodological Model’) on Marathi literary historiography, which interrogates the colonial portrayal of decline during the Islamic period by revisiting the intercultural richness of figures like Namdeo.

Sub-theme IV has three chapters dedicated to ‘Translation and Transcreation’. In ‘An Equal Music’, CS Lakshmi offers a personal reflection on translation both as a creative process and as a relationship between the author and translator. Somdatta Mandal in ‘Translation, Interpretation, and Transcreation’ explores the various dimensions of translation in the Indian context and also raises important questions about the concept of the ‘ideal translator’.

The compilation addresses different aspects of Vijayan’s oeuvre, including his literary works, his contributions to political thought, his engagements as a cartoonist, and his role as a translator. In this introductory chapter, EV Ramakrishnan delves into the multi-dimensional persona of Vijayan, analysing how the writer is defined as a ‘critical insider’ within the socio-political and cultural contexts of postcolonial India.

The most prominent identification of Gagan Gill’s writings by commentators has been her Buddhist belief system. Several essays have engaged with this aspect of her writing commenting on her spirituality, her philosophical bent of mind and her meditative approach to the world. Radhavallabh Tripathi identifies the foundations of Gill’s writings to be the Buddhist principles of acceptance of suffering, searching the reasons for suffering, tearing off the illusion of craving and the concept of impermanence of the world. He notes that she belongs to the long intellectual tradition in India that after Buddha centres on suffering.

The first section presents A Passage to India through translations in various languages, and film and stage adaptations, thereby building a memorable montage that the novel inspires. The opening essay is by a novelist, Anjum Hasan, and begins delightfully with Forsterian language that a child heard from a Forster-devotee father and didn’t know what it meant! The personal and the political merge over time and the book gains complex meaning for Anjum even as the heavily marked pages are, by then, being carried around the parental home in a plastic bag (p.
12). From that, we move swiftly to a bilingual essay by Rupert Snell ‘On Translating A Passage into Hindi’ based on an experiment with six Indian translators that yielded an astonishing variety of ‘equivalent terminology’ even with the title of the book.

As Adil Jussawalla points out, Keki Daruwalla’s works are ‘as relevant today as when they were first published (in 1970)’ (p. 59). Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca relays, ‘Mature poetic talent…literary stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness’ (p. 72), even in the poet’s debut collection, left an impression on Nissim Ezekiel. The ‘caustic’ and ‘incisive’ writing (p. 105) that shapes much of the poet’s oeuvre,

I was eventually drawn to novels through exceptional paragraphs cited in essays. By my late teens, I was probably more likely to read a piece of criticism about a work rather than the work itself. His insight about novels is something which hard working teachers in their classes do not want their students to develop. Gratified with his epiphany, Chaudhuri looked for standalone paragraph(s) in novels which ‘belongs to a story but is also independent of it, in that it seems equally located in an irreducible life and textuality outside that novel as it is in the life narrated and contained within it’.

A noteworthy section in the Introduction is: ‘Vacana Dharma and Hinduism’. Nadkarni shows here how the basic beliefs and practices of Vīraśaiva-Lingāyats are to be traced to Hinduism. For example, the idea of One God is very much there in the Rigveda (Ekam Sad viprāhbahudhāvadanti, etc.). The practice of chanting the holy mantra of ‘Om Namah Śivāya’ is from Hinduism.